Few alternative therapies are more divisive than homeopathy.
Whenever I write about the subject, I get bucket-loads of hate mail. Somehow,
homeopathy has the power to touch raw nerves and strong emotions. And it makes
fallacies appear like mushrooms after the rain:

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It has stood the test of time.

·        
It is approved even by Nobel Prize winners.

·        
It has millions of satisfied customers.

True, many consumers use homeopathy; but most do not even understand
what it is. They think homeopathy is holistic, natural or herbal medicine. In
truth, all these terms describe different entities. Crucially, many homeopathy-fans
assume that homeopathy is effective and safe. This notion is as wide-spread as
it is erroneous.

So what are the facts about homeopathy?

Homeopathy is based on the ‘like cures like’ principle: if a
substance causes a set of symptoms in a healthy person, homeopaths will use it
for curing these symptoms in their patients. This may sound complicated but, in
fact, it could not be simpler: coffee prevents sleep, therefore homeopaths use
it to treat insomnia; opium makes you constipated, therefore homeopaths employ
it to treat ileus; onions make your eyes water, therefore homeopaths use it to
treat hay-fever.

But homeopaths do not administer pure coffee, opium or
onion; they endlessly dilute their remedies in a process called ‘potentisation’
(essentially this means serial dilutions with vigorous shaking at each step).
The term already hints at the second main principle of homeopathy: according to
homeopaths, potentisation renders the remedy not weaker but more potent. Thus
the vast majority of homeopathic remedies is far too dilute to contain even a
single molecule of what it says on the bottle.

Homeopaths and their followers know all this, of course. In
their defense, they claim that science is as yet unable to explain how
homeopathy works, implying thereby that homeopaths are ahead of their time. The
truth, however, is that science can easily explain that an explanation which
would be in line with the known laws of nature is an impossibility. Homeopaths
are not ahead of their time; they are about 200 years behind it!

Considering the extreme implausibility of homeopathy, it
comes as no surprise that the evidence fails to show that highly diluted
homeopathic remedies are effective. Currently there are some 300 clinical
trials of homeopathy; their results are, of course, not uniform but, based on
the most reliable of these studies, investigators have demonstrated over and
over again that homeopathic remedies do not work. And if you don’t trust me,
perhaps you believe the ‘National Health and Medical Research Council’ of
Australia; they recently published a very thorough evaluation of homeopathy
which concluded that “there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that
homeopathy is effective.”

But at least homeopathy is safe, enthusiasts say. Wrong
again! Highly dilute remedies cannot cause side-effects, of course, unless they
are contaminated or adulterated. Yet homeopathy as a medical practice is certainly
not safe. Every time seriously ill patients replace effective treatments with
homeopathic remedies, they put their lives in danger. The Internet abounds with
recommendations to treat conditions like cancer, AIDS, diabetes or asthma with
homeopathy, and an uncounted number of patients have been gravely harmed by
following the advice from homeopaths. For instance, dozens of studies show that
homeopaths across the world tend to advise parents against immunizing their
kids and recommend useless ‘homeopathic vaccinations’ instead. This behavior not
only endangers the child in question, it also jeopardizes our herd immunity and
thus puts us all at risk.

So, why are some doctors (35 years ago, I was one of them
myself) so impressed with the progress their patients make after homeopathic
treatments? The answer is much simpler than we might think. Most patients do
get better whatever clinicians do with them (sometimes even despite their
doctors). This is due to placebo effects, regression towards the mean, the
natural history of the disease and several other phenomena. In essence, if
physicians are kind and compassionate to their patients, nature does its work.
Voltaire already knew that when he wrote: “nature cures the disease, while
doctors amuse their patients”.

I think this is a message which we, patients and healthcare
professionals alike, should remember; it teaches us to be humble, makes us
think critically, and hopefully protects us from becoming the victims of
quackery.

Top image: Shutterstock